Mr. Monk Gets Even (2 page)
CHAPTER ONE
Mr. Monk Is Murder
I
’d never gone so long without a murder.
Investigating one, that is.
In the six months since I’d moved to Summit, New Jersey, to work as a police officer, I hadn’t come across a single homicide.
And for me, that was a major adjustment. That’s because for years I was the personal assistant to Adrian Monk, the famous detective and consultant to the San Francisco Police Department, and it seemed like we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without getting involved in a murder investigation.
The man was a murder magnet. It used to drive me crazy (that, and his obsessive-compulsive disorder). It didn’t matter whether we were at a family wedding, on a flight to Paris, attending a play, visiting a winery, or shopping for groceries—we’d inevitably find a corpse. He couldn’t go two days without ending up in the middle of a homicide investigation.
And now, after all my complaining, I actually found myself missing the murders. Let me qualify that before you write me off as a terrible person. It’s not the violent loss of someone’s life that I missed, but rather the intensity, complexity, and high stakes of the investigation that often followed.
The crimes I investigated in Summit weren’t nearly as interesting, complicated, or important as murder, which I suppose was a good thing—at least for the community I was serving, and for police Chief Randy Disher, who’d recruited me. He was formerly a lieutenant at the SFPD, where he’d been the right-hand man to Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, the guy who Monk worked for.
Disher got to know me well while I was Monk’s assistant, but not as well as he got to know Monk’s previous assistant, Sharona Fleming. The two of them fell in love and he moved to Summit to be with her.
Disher warned me that things moved a little slower in Summit than they did in San Francisco, and that was true. Except, of course, for the short time Monk was here, when suddenly there was an armed robbery, a firebombing, and a murder all in the space of a couple of days.
Since then, though, the biggest crime I’d had to contend with was one that Monk, with his obsessions for cleanliness and order, would have actually considered truly heinous: I was investigating a string of laundry detergent thefts from area grocery stores, including more than twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth from a single store in Summit.
That’s what led me to spend my day off in Sharona’s old, dented Volvo wagon in the grocery store’s parking lot, waiting for the thief to strike again. Since we were only a six-person force, I was doing the stakeout on my own. But I figured that after facing countless murderers I could handle a mere detergent thief by myself, even if he was the Professor Moriarty of his field of crime.
Although life in Summit wasn’t particularly exciting, I still enjoyed being a cop. Next to being Monk’s assistant, it was by far the best job I’d ever had and the first one I’d earned based on my skills and proven performance rather than being something that I’d just chanced into (like working for Monk) or grabbed out of financial necessity (like every other job I’d ever had).
So I took enormous pride in the badge and gun that I carried and the uniform that I usually wore, even if I was often bored, homesick, and lonely.
I hadn’t had a chance to find an apartment in Summit yet, so I was living at a local hotel at a discounted “law enforcement” rate (which meant I was also the unofficial “house detective” for the hotel and got called whenever a guest got rowdy or anything disappeared). So it wasn’t as though I was living in solitude.
And I certainly didn’t lack dating opportunities. Plenty of men in Summit hit on me—I just wasn’t interested in pursuing a relationship. I wasn’t missing out on the excitement of life in the big city, either, not with New York just a forty-five-minute train ride away.
What I missed was San Francisco itself and my life there. I missed the fog and sourdough bread, the cable cars and the Golden Gate, the steep hills and bay windows. But most of all, I missed my twenty-year-old daughter, Julie, even though she’d moved away from home to live across the bay and attend UC Berkeley long before I left.
Now she was on summer break and working as Monk’s temporary assistant. Julie was living in our house again since we hadn’t had any luck renting it out, and she was trying to save what little money she was earning. Nobody would ever get rich working for Adrian Monk.
At first, I’d called her two or three times a week . . . until she stopped answering my calls. I got the subtle hint. So I cut my calls back to once every few weeks so she wouldn’t find me quite so needy and irritating.
And as infuriating, demanding, and frustrating as Monk was, I missed him, too. I had known that I would, but I hadn’t expected to miss him quite so much.
He’d called me a few times since I’d moved, mostly to talk about Julie. He’d usually start by saying what a great assistant she was, and then complain that her car was a rolling death trap (because the tires on her car were a mix of brands and didn’t have matching tread designs) or that she drank smoothies (he was afraid of milk and couldn’t stand the idea of various fruits being blended together) or that she expressed a wanton disregard for human decency (for wearing a bracelet on one wrist without a matching one on the other). These were all deficiencies in her character that naturally he attributed to lazy parenting on my part.
You’d think that infuriating diatribes like that would make me thankful that I was a few thousand miles away from him, but the anger and irritation he caused only made me more homesick.
It’s crazy, I know.
And I had to keep my craziness a secret from both Julie and Monk.
So I pumped Ellen Morse for information about them during her biweekly trips from San Francisco back to Summit to manage her store, Poop, where she sold products made from excrement, including shampoo, artwork, stationery, incense, and even coffee. She’d opened a second store in San Francisco just to be closer to Monk, who’d improbably and miraculously started a relationship with her during the short time that he was in Summit, despite the fact that he was repulsed by what she did for a living.
But Ellen was slightly obsessive-compulsive herself, at least as far as symmetry and organization went, and loved Monk, though she was frustrated by his crippling fear of intimacy. They hadn’t kissed yet and he’d held her hand only once, just long enough to give it a squeeze, and then had immediately slathered his hands with disinfectant cream, which killed not only germs but also the slightest shred of romance.
The way I looked at it, Ellen was lucky he touched her at all, considering she regularly handled poop products—such as fossilized dinosaur dung and greeting cards made from buffalo crap—with her bare hands. She’d repeatedly assured Monk that the products were totally safe and sanitary, but he didn’t see how that was possible if they were derived from poop. Intellectually, I knew she was right. But instinctively, even I had to side with Monk.
He was on my mind while I sat on that boring stakeout because of the nature of the crime that I was investigating—detergent thefts—and because in a few short days I would be back in San Francisco, taking an early vacation to attend the wedding of Monk’s agoraphobic brother, Ambrose. He was marrying Yuki, his ex-con, biker-chick girlfriend and live-in assistant.
That was bound to be a memorable event.
Before I could give much thought to it, my attention was drawn to a short man in his thirties wearing an untucked red flannel shirt over a gray hoodie. He was rushing out of the grocery store and pushing a cart filled with jugs of Tide detergent.
I was pretty sure he hadn’t paid for any of it and that he’d managed to slip past the busy cashiers without being noticed. So I got out of my car and met him just as he popped the trunk on a 2005 Chevy Malibu with badly oxidized blue paint. Monk would have arrested him just for the lousy paint job.
The man was jittery, and all his facial features looked like they were crammed way too close together, as if his head had been scrunched by some heavy object, so he appeared to be wincing even before I pulled out my badge and flashed it at him.
“Excuse me, sir. I’m Natalie Teeger, Summit Police,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Jack Badelaire,” he said.
“Can I see some ID?”
“What’s the problem?” He took out his wallet and handed me his driver’s license. He was indeed Jack Badelaire, and a resident of Summit.
“I’ve never seen anybody buy so much detergent at one time,” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m a very clean person.”
He obviously didn’t know who he was talking to. I got right in his face. “The hell you are. I spent years working for Adrian Monk, the cleanest man on earth. He wipes his bottles of disinfectant with disinfectant. He cleans his brooms after every use and replaces them weekly. He washes his doorknobs in the dishwasher. Once a year, he removes his flooring and scrubs the concrete foundation underneath. So don’t you dare tell me that you’re a very clean person, because compared to him, you live in filth.”
He looked frightened now, and not because I was a cop who’d caught him committing a crime. He thought he was dealing with an armed lunatic. Perhaps he was.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I need detergent.”
“All this is for you?”
“I have a big, dirty family.”
I nodded. “Can I see your receipt?”
He made an elaborate show of looking through his wallet and his pockets. “I must have lost it.”
“No problem. We’ll just go back inside the store and find your cashier. I’m sure she’ll remember you. It’s not often they get a guy buying a dozen jugs of Tide.”
“I think she went on break,” he said.
“Then we’ll ask the manager to call up your transaction on the register.”
He licked his lips and shifted his weight. “You know, I am so tired and distracted, it’s possible I might have forgotten to pay. It’s very hectic in the store today. I can go back inside and pay now.”
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Mr. Badelaire. I’m going to arrest you for shoplifting. Then I’m going to look through weeks of store security footage, and we both know I’ll discover that you’ve forgotten to pay for cartloads of detergent many times, so the charge against you is going to become felony theft, and you’ll end up doing hard time in prison. Of course, there’s another way we can handle this.”
“You can let me off with a stern warning?”
“You can tell me where you were going to deliver the detergent and agree to be a prosecution witness against the others in the ring. You could get off with just restitution and probation, though that will ultimately be up to the DA and the judge.”
“What makes you think there’s a ring?”
“Well, I sure hope there is, for your sake,” I said. “Otherwise you’re going straight to prison.”
I think he grimaced, but it was hard to tell with that scrunched-up face of his.
“There’s a ring,” he said.
“I thought there might be,” I said.
• • •
The U-Store-It facility outside of town was composed of three long, flat-roofed, one-story, cinder-block buildings that contained dozens of individual storage units, each about the size of a single-car garage, with roll-up corrugated-metal doors that were painted orange.
There was a tall fence topped with razor wire around the property and only one gated entryway for cars. The walk-in gate, however, was propped open with a brick, so people like me could get in without having to punch in the required code. That seemed like a mighty big security breach, but there was a reason for it.
An open storage unit at the end of one of the long rows was attracting a steady flow of people, mostly women. The ones who were leaving the unit carried grocery bags or were pushing shopping carts I recognized as having been borrowed from Costco and several other local big-box stores. The carts and bags were full of diapers, shampoo, and laundry detergent.